Brawl: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Mixed Martial Arts Competition
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Reviews for Brawl
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A UFC-centric history of early MMA which covers the first 30 UFCs or so and some of the other organisations which started at the time. Interesting stuff if you are a TUF n00b like my good self.
Book preview
Brawl - Erich Krauss and Bret Aita
2000
PART I
In the Beginning
CHAPTER 1
From the Arena to the Ring
Over two thousand years ago, in the dusty arena of the Greek Olympics, a hero named Arrachion engaged a dangerous competitor in no-holds-barred, hand-to-hand combat before a crowd of thousands. After a lengthy and brutal battle, Arrachion got caught in a crushing choke hold. His pride and valor would not let him submit, however, and even as he found himself fading to black he struggled to put his foe away. When nothing else presented itself, he seized his adversary’s toe and wrenched it back. The pain made his opponent submit, but not soon enough. As the fighters were untangled, Arrachion was discovered to be dead, apparently of asphyxiation—but because his opponent had submitted first, the deceased Arrachion was declared the victor, and his memory has lived on through the ages.
For thousands of years, soldiers have tested their hand-to-hand combat skills in war, transforming their bodies into effective and deadly weapons. Although there were those who survived to become heroes, the bloodstained battlefield was a harsh proving ground, and eventually the ways of war were turned into sport so combatants could test their skills and live to tell the tale. The participants in these man-to-man spectacles were limited to the brave, and a new kind of hero was born. Spectators clamored by the thousands to behold them in action. Images of broken arms, knees to the face, and powerful choke holds spawned daydreams of competition, victory, and glory.
Even in our modern technological world, where battles are won with the touch of a button or the pull of a trigger, the need to experience the rush of hand-to-hand combat persists in both warriors and their fans. In Brazil, they call these competitions vale tudo. In Japan, it’s called submission fighting. It sprang up in the United States as no-holds-barred and was later dubbed mixed martial arts. Whether combatants battle it out in cages, rings, back alleys, or warehouses, their reasons are usually the same: to discover what works and what doesn’t, to test their personal limits, and to answer the age-old question, Who is the toughest?
This anything-goes style of hand-to-hand competition is documented as early as 648 BC with the introduction of pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling, into the Greek Olympics. Pankration
means all-powers,
or all-in-combat,
and it originated when fighters in both boxing and wrestling began refining their skills, seeking a new level of competition. This is not to say that these individual sports weren’t already vicious. Boxers, unlike today’s pugilists, were allowed to punch their opponents unmercifully while they were on the ground. Wrestlers learned various joint manipulations to inflict as much pain upon their opponents as possible. In both boxing and wrestling, there were no time limits, no rounds, and no weight classes. The bouts were decided when a fighter either submitted or was rendered incapable of continuing the match.
The pankratiasts of yore took man-to-man combat one step further. They synthesized the techniques of the boxer’s strikes and the wrestler’s groundwork into a lethal and individualistic fighting style. The only rules in pankration were no biting and no gouging of the eyes, and the matches were often brutal. Many ended with the champion being permanently disabled and the loser dying. On the upside, however, there was immeasurable glory and honor involved. The victors of these games were treated like mythical heroes, their lives and deeds depicted on pottery and immortalized in stone carvings.
Tales of pankration champions are shrouded in legend and poetic license. One story is of the charismatic Milo of Crotona, who achieved a level of popularity comparable to that of modern-day martial artist Bruce Lee. He engaged in all sorts of public displays of skill, and it was rumored that Milo built up his unusual strength by lugging a calf on his back every day until it became a bull. Stories recount how Milo would tie a cord around his head and hold his breath, creating such a rush of blood to his skull that the pressure would snap the cord.
Unfortunately, Milo’s tendency to constantly test himself led to his demise. One day, he happened upon a dying tree that someone had begun to separate with wedges. He got it into his head that he could pull the two halves of the tree apart. As he attempted this, the wedges slipped out and the tree halves snapped together, pinning Milo. Apparently, trapped like this in the forest, the legendary fighter was eaten alive by wolves.
Yet another account is of a pankratiast who would attack his opponents with a straight-hand strike to the gut. His fingernails were hard and jagged, and he used them to cut into his challengers. Once his fingers were under the skin, he thrust his hand deep and proceeded to extract their bowels. Victory in these matches was secured by submission, by knockout, and often by death. Many times, fighters chose to assure their wins by the most conclusive option available.
Perhaps the most famous pankration fighter, however, was Dioxippus. His reputation in battle was so daunting that no one dared fight him. He was a close friend of Alexander the Great, and it is conjectured that through his training of both the Greek and the Roman armies pankration spread throughout Europe and eventually made its way over the Himalayas with Alexander’s forces. There is a theory that pankration’s deadly effectiveness, mixed with the religious and meditative practices of the Chinese, became the root of Asian martial arts.
Pankration lasted until the height of the Roman Empire. Although it continued on in the Greek Olympics, in Rome it had mutated into a gladiatorial blood sport, for which warriors donned bladed gloves and fought to the death. But in the fourth century AD, when Christianity took over as the official religion of the conquering Roman Empire, both the gladiatorial games and the Greek Olympic games, with their pagan ancestry, were done away with. And so went pankration. It’s fortunate that the sport had already been established throughout the known world, sowing the seeds for what would surface nearly three thousand years later as mixed martial arts (MMA).
Submission wrestling competitions began to emerge in America in the late nineteenth century. Traveling carnivals featured athletic shows,
in which brave audience members could take on one of the carnival’s wrestlers. If the challenger could last in the ring with this hired gun for a predetermined amount of time, he received a cash prize. But seldom did challengers walk away victorious, and seldom did they walk away unscathed. These nomadic wrestlers were brutal diehards, dedicated to the art of wrestling. They were kings of the ring, and they were far from being the type of men one might imagine today when the words professional wrestler
are spoken. Their style was called hooking,
named after the submission tactics they used called hooks
(Sam Chan. The Japanese Pro-wrestling / Reality Based Martial Art Connection.
15 Feb. 1998. BJJ.org. 21 Feb. 2001.
In hooking, there was a hierarchy of skill. Traveling with most carnivals was a journeyman, a somewhat capable wrestler who was pitted against nonthreatening challengers. Above him was the shooter, the more proficient wrestler who took on the difficult opponents. And then there was the master of the art, the submission-wrestling guru known—for better or worse—as the hooker.
Hookers knew all the tricks of the trade, and the carnival was their domain. They policed the matches of their underlings to ensure that a desperate challenger did not resort to biting or gouging. They settled territorial disputes, and because they were often faced with skilled opponents looking for an easy buck, they had to refine their art continually in order to stay on top of their game (Tony Checcine. Catch History.
Tony Checcine’s Catch Wrestling. 18 Feb. 2001. What is a Hooker?
Although the popularity of these athletic shows began to fade in America in the early part of the twentieth century, the art of hooking survived. It was introduced to Japan in 1914, when legendary wrestler Ad Santel defeated a fifth-degree black belt in judo. The Japanese opponent had claimed to be the Japanese judo champion, so after the match Santel crowned himself world judo champion (Chan). His declaration embarrassed the founder of judo so severely that he sent another student to challenge Santel and restore honor to the Kodokan, the world-renowned judo dojo in Japan. But once again Santel was victorious, and a few years later he extended a challenge to the entire Kodokan, daring its members to contest his claim as champ. He went on to secure more victories, and because of these matches, a fascination with Western submission fighting erupted in Japan.
The legendary wrestler Karl Gotch made a further impression on the Japanese with his exceptional hooking talent. Already a European wrestling champion, Gotch had moved to the United States in 1959 to continue to promote his skills. But because he was a reality-based wrestler, he wasn’t accepted warmly in America, where pro wrestling had become mostly staged matches known as works
or worked
fights (Chan). Gotch did not adhere to predetermined outcomes, and many American pro wrestlers feared both him and his submission skills. Searching for a new platform, Gotch went to Japan, where he quickly earned the title God of Pro Wrestling.
Among Gotch’s admirers were many of the athletes participating in the Japan Wrestling Alliance (JWA), an organization founded by a former sumo professional and devoted to promoting worked matches. Gotch’s hooking style changed their conception of wrestling, and many went on to become his students. Satoru Sayama, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Antonio Inoki, and Akira Maeda were the most famous of his pupils. Several of these wrestlers were already proficient in a variety of martial arts, such as muay Thai (a form of kickboxing that utilizes devastating elbow and knee strikes), judo, karate, and sumo. Combining their backgrounds with Gotch’s hooking, they developed their own hybrid-fighting styles, and each would have a direct impact on contemporary MMA competition.
Japan’s most famous wrestler, Antonio Inoki, was kicked out of the JWA in 1971 when it was discovered that he was plotting to take over the promotion. This did not halt his ambition, however, and he went on to form one of Japan’s most popular wrestling organizations ever: New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW). The first NJPW match was held in March of 1972, and its popularity inspired Inoki’s contemporaries Sayama, Maeda, and Fujiwara to join.
NJPW was catapulted into the spotlight in 1976, when Inoki staged a mixed martial arts tournament. It was an extravaganza the likes of which had never before been seen in Japan, and although the fights were, for the most part, worked, the concept of pitting style versus style helped to elevate Japanese pro wrestling still further. For the event, Inoki scoured the globe and rounded up some of the world’s most respected fighters, including Olympic judo gold medalist William Ruska, boxer Chuck Wepner, and world kyokushin karate champion Willie Williams (Steve Slagle. Antonio Inoki.
Professional Wrestling Online Museum. 3 Feb. 2001.
The bout did not live up to the fans’ expectations, however. Ali’s training camp suspected that Inoki would use his submission tactics and try to turn the fight into a real match, so rules were established that barred Inoki from using any hooking techniques or suplexes (Chan). The result was a long and boring fight that ended in a fifteen-round draw. But this tournament, along with the NJPW’s adoption of many martial arts techniques, specifically low kicks and judo throws, forever changed pro wrestling in Japan (Chan). Many wrestlers were now inspired to bring more realism to their matches, and their fighting styles became more applicable to MMA combat.
In response to this interest in realism, Akira Maeda left the NJPW and formed the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF). Sayama, Fuji-wara, and Nobuhiko Takada (a student of hooking) quickly followed suit. Although the UWF bouts had predetermined outcomes, making them essentially worked, the techniques applied during the matches were delivered with full force. This became known as stiff
wrestling. But the UWF did not stop there. Real matches were eventually arranged between certain wrestlers and boxers, moving Japanese pro wrestling still closer to MMA competition.
This evolution was not rapid enough for some wrestlers, who were eager to test their skills in full-on MMA warfare. On September 2, 1985, in a match between Maeda and Sayama, Maeda purposefully kicked Sayama in the groin (Chan). Sayama abandoned any plan for a predetermined outcome and laid into Maeda with full force. The match became violent, and thousands of spectators got their first glimpse of MMA fighting. It was breathtaking.
Sayama was promptly fired from the UWF for his extreme retaliation. For the time being, he was finished participating in staged matches. He founded Shooto in 1987, a completely legitimate organization with no fixed fights, and he brought true MMA competition to Japan. Later, he organized the first Japan open vale tudo (anything goes) tournament, drawing the acclaimed jiu-jitsu tactician Rickson Gracie over from Brazil to fight (Chan).
The same year that Sayama founded Shooto, Maeda, having returned to the NJPW, had another outburst during a worked fight. On November 27, 1987, he once again purposefully kicked a rival wrestler, but this time the damage he inflicted was much more serious. He broke three bones in his opponent’s face, and he was fired the following March because no wrestler was willing to enter the ring with him (Chan).
Not to be stopped, Maeda and Takada formed a new UWF in April of 1988. But their organization suffered without a young and dynamic fighter. To solve this problem, they convinced two of the more popular wrestlers, Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki, to leave NJPW for the new UWF (Chan). Despite this talent, the UWF ultimately failed, and it disbanded in 1990. Several spin-off promotions stepped in to fill the void. Maeda started an organization called RINGS, which put on half-worked, half-real matches. But the most notable of the UWF splinters was Pancrase.
Royce Gracie ofter a brutal UFC bout, surrounded by his brothers and family.
Pancrase was the brainchild of a businessman named Ozaki, who combined forces with Suzuki, Funaki, and wrestler Karl Gotch with the intention of creating the most realistic fighting promotion possible. Although the rules were not as loose as those of the soon-to-emerge Ultimate Fighting Championship in America, it was a far cry from the fixed matches of pro wrestling. There were no weight classes. A competitor could strike his opponent with a closed fist to the body, and an open palm to the head. A fighter could also kick, knee, and elbow— but knocking an opponent out with strikes was not always the choice method of achieving victory. With master submission fighters like Funaki, the emphasis of Pancrase was on technique, with much of the action occurring on the ground. If, however, a fighter found himself in trouble, he could work his way to the edge of the ring and cling to the ropes. The referee would separate the fighters and the match would be restarted standing. This reprieve was called the rope escape,
and it was a remnant of the organization’s pro wrestling roots.
To increase the popularity of this new organization, the promoters sought out foreign martial artists who had proven their courage and skill in hand-to-hand combat. One such foreigner was Ken Shamrock, who hailed from the Japanese pro wrestling scene. With his hulking frame and intense personality, Shamrock quickly became a crowd pleaser.
Another foreigner who helped this new organization attain the international-fight-world spotlight was the famed Dutch kickboxer Bas Rutten. Growing up in Holland, suffering from asthma and a rare skin disease, Rutten had no idea that one day he would go to war in a ring before tens of thousands of Japanese fight fans. He was too busy fending off the neighborhood bullies, who had chosen to pick on him because of his handicaps. I got messed with a lot as a kid, walking around with special gloves,
remembers Rutten. I was called a leper, a homo—everything. Sometimes I would have to stay in bed for three weeks, and I couldn’t walk or nothing.
All this abuse wore on the young Rutten, but at twelve years of age, after seeing Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, he discovered a way to fight back. He enrolled in tae kwon do classes and learned how to kick and punch. Just a few weeks later, he was forced to put his new defense techniques to use in a street fight and broke his adversary’s nose. When his parents found out, they yanked him from martial arts training. But those few weeks of instruction stuck with him, and ten years later, when he was out on his own, he picked up where he had left off. I soon realized that tae kwon do was not it for me,
says Bas, because there were no low kicks allowed, no knees, and no punches to the head. I realized that in a street fight they can hit you to the head. Then I started doing Thai boxing in addition to my tae kwon do. I had my first fight after six weeks of training. I won by knockout with a spinning back kick to the liver.
After winning his first kickboxing bout, Bas decided he wanted to be the best fighter in the country, which was not an easy task in his homeland. Fighting is like soccer in Holland,
explains Rutten. Everybody does Thai boxing.
Despite the fact that he was competing against the toughest in the world, he racked up an impressive kickboxing record of fourteen wins and two losses. Having garnered a reputation as one of the strongest strikers alive, he attracted Pancrase’s attention.
In 1993, Rutten traveled to Japan and entered his first Pancrase bout. I was pretty much a striker,
says Rutten. I came in at two hundred pounds. I came from Thai boxing, where a five-pound difference meant a lot. My first opponent was forty-five pounds heavier than me. I also thought the fight was going to be five rounds of three minutes, but then they told me it was one round of thirty minutes. I told them no problem, because I was in good shape, but in my mind I was thinking, ‘Oh my God!’ Luckily, it turned out okay.
As a matter of fact, it turned out better than okay for the Dutchman. Rutten won his bout with Ryushi Yanagisawa by way of a knockout. I caught him right under the jaw with a palm,
explains Rutten. He stood up, and I kicked him in the liver and hit him again in the head. When he fell down, I kneed him in the head and it was over. I won in forty-three seconds, and he was taken straight to the hospital.
By no means was Rutten’s debut a fluke. He returned to Pancrase just a few months later and proceeded to knock out Takaku Fuke in the same dramatic fashion. With each victory, he became a more complete warrior. Pancrase made me a good fighter because of the rope escapes,
claims Rutten. It makes you more of a thinker than a doer. If you are close to submitting somebody and are close to the ropes, you first have to drag them towards the center of the ring. There is more thinking involved than just submitting someone. The only thing I didn’t like about Pancrase was the openhand strikes and shin protection. I wished I could have closed my fists.
Even with the openhand rule, Rutten claimed more than his share of victories in the Pancrase ring. With almost thirty bouts under his belt, he experienced only four losses. His superlative strikes and impressive submission skills entertained Japanese crowds of tens of thousands.
Although Rutten and others made Pancrase tremendously popular in Japan, and similar competitions were booming thousands of miles away in Brazil, it wasn’t until 1994 that MMA would be reintroduced on a global scale through an unlikely champion named Royce Gracie, and a groundbreaking event called the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
CHAPTER 2
The Ultimate Challenge
With thousands of bloodthirsty fans packed into McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado, and hundreds of thousands more watching at home on pay-per-view, a train of brothers clad in matching sweat suits emerged from the blue lights and billowing smoke—the Gracie family had come to the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in force. Although their specialized style of jiu-jitsu was virtually unknown in America, the family had been participating in no-holds-barred events for more than fifty years in Brazil, taking on all comers from a variety of disciplines, such as boxing, karate, and kung fu. But tonight’s event was more than just another competition in which to test their skills. The UFC had been designed as a platform to introduce the art of Gracie jiu-jitsu to the world.
Now it was up to Royce Gracie, the family’s chosen representative, to prove the superiority of his family art. Although he was the smallest competitor in the event, he was expected to defeat his larger opponents in a competition where there were no rules, no weight classes, and no time limits. Tonight, Royce was expected to bring honor to his family name, just as his father, Helio, had done for half a century.
Born on October 1, 1913, Helio Gracie was the youngest of five brothers growing up on the Brazilian Amazon’s wild jungle frontier. Unlike his brothers, Helio was not athletically endowed. He suffered from fainting spells and poor health, and under doctor’s orders his family kept a close watch on him, not allowing him to participate in sports of any kind. But that didn’t stop the strong-willed boy from pursuing his dream and becoming a fighter who, in his prime, was considered by many Brazilians to be the toughest warrior on Earth.
The Gracie family was introduced to the Eastern fighting arts by Mitsuyo Maeda, a famous Japanese jiu-jitsu practitioner whose hand-to-hand combat skills were unmatched. Much like the hookers in America, Maeda had begun his career participating in wrestling tournaments sponsored by the carnivals that traveled throughout rural Japan. Eventually, he moved on from his wrestling roots to judo, a sport that combined several Japanese jiu-jitsu styles with an emphasis on throws and strikes. Maeda was fortunate enough to study directly under the founder of judo, Jigoro Kano.
The amazing Helio backstaqe at the UCF.
Quickly becoming Kano’s favorite student, Maeda was made an official judo ambassador and sent on a worldwide mission to bring recognition to the art. He traveled throughout Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Determined to put judo on the map, he challenged and defeated hundreds of wrestlers and heavyweight boxers alike in no-holds-barred demonstrations.
By the time Maeda’s travels brought him to Brazil, he had his art down to a science. As always, he participated in a number of wrestling demonstrations against local challengers; and, as always, he blazed through the competition. His victories, however, caught the attention of some wealthy Brazilian landowners, who were so impressed with Maeda’s skill that they rewarded him with property.
The offer was too good to pass up, and Maeda made a new home for himself on the Amazon’s expanding frontier. Although he continued to train and perfect his art, the jiu-jitsu master started on another mission: to establish a colony of Japanese immigrants in Brazil. While on this path, he met Gasteo Gracie, a scholar who used his political connections to help Maeda with his colony-building cause. In return, Maeda offered to teach Gasteo’s son Carlos the secrets of his fighting art.
Carlos excelled as a student, and then as a teacher. He taught all his brothers jiu-jitsu, except for Helio, who was still considered too weak to participate. When Carlos relocated the family to Rio de Janeiro to open the Gracie JiuJitsu Academy, Helio sat on the sidelines, watching and learning from his brothers’ classes, waiting for a chance to follow in their footsteps.
That opportunity came the day Carlos failed to show up for a private lesson with one of his students. Having watched his brother for years, studying the moves, Helio took it upon himself to teach the student. By the time the lesson was over, the student wanted Helio as his instructor.
This so impressed Carlos that he finally permitted Helio to begin his official training. Because he lacked size and strength, Helio relied more on leverage and technique. He constantly searched for ways to make the methods of traditional jiu-jitsu less strength dependant. While accepting what worked and throwing out what didn’t, Helio realized the importance of fighting from his back. When bigger and more powerful opponents took him to the ground, Helio learned that he could control them better by using his legs rather than competing against their arm strength. Expending less energy, he could wait for them to make a mistake and then catch them in an arm bar or a choke. Instead of focusing on throws, as one did in Japanese jiu-jitsu or judo, Helio became a master at fighting on the ground. And so Brazilian jiu-jitsu was born.
Helio improved countless techniques, and, knowing they could benefit anyone in a fight, he passed them on to his students and his brothers. To prove the effectiveness of his refinements, now known as Gracie jiu-jitsu, Helio entered no-holds-barred matches against martial artists of other fighting styles. In no time at all, he had chewed through the local champions in boxing, wrestling, and karate.
Soon, word of Helio’s effective fighting style and challenge matches had spread throughout Brazil, and, in keeping with Brazil’s notorious reputation as a country of savage street fighters, plenty of takers stepped up to Helio’s challenge, hoping to knock the Gracie brothers down.
In 1931, at the age of seventeen, Helio climbed into the ring to face a renowned pugilist by the name of Antonio Portugal and defeated him in under thirty seconds. This match, and several other higher-profile bouts, gave the Gracie name national attention. But there were those who didn’t acknowledge the effectiveness of Gracie jiu-jitsu, including many judo students who wanted to prove the superiority of Kano’s teachings.
Masahik Kimura was the man chosen to do it. An undefeated Japanese judo champion for sixteen years, and an undefeated world champion for five years, he was a living legend. Kimura came to Brazil in 1951 not only to accept the Gracie Challenge, but also to put the family in its place and remind the world that jiu-jitsu and judo came from Japan, not Brazil.
Even though Kimura was ten years younger than Helio, who was now forty-two, and outweighed him by almost fifty pounds, Helio welcomed the fight. While no punching and kicking would be allowed in this grappling match, no holds would be barred. Kimura was confident that he would win the bout, and he went so far as to tell the press that if Helio could last three minutes with him in the ring, then Helio should consider it a victory. In front of twenty thousand spectators at Maracana Stadium, the largest soccer stadium in the world, Helio fought with heart. He would not give up, even when Kimura dislocated his elbow with an arm lock. The fight did not end until Helio’s brother Carlos threw in the towel at the thirteen-minute mark.
Helio lost the match, but he had survived in the ring with the world champion for thirteen minutes, something few had ever done. He had proven just how effective his techniques were against a younger, larger, and much stronger opponent, making the Gracie family name and their fighting system even more renowned throughout Brazil.
After his defeat, Helio continued the family challenge. In 1957, at fifty years old, he stepped up to face a former student, Valdemar Santana. Despite Santana being more powerful and a great deal younger, Helio battled it out for a grueling three hours and forty-five minutes. It was an amazing feat for a man his age, and although he lost the match, it was further proof that Gracie jiu-jitsu was an art that demanded skill rather than brawn. This appealed to the masses, bringing droves of students to the already popular Gracie Academy.
That match signaled the end of Helio’s career in the ring, but Gracie jiu-jitsu did not fade away. Helio had been teaching all of his sons— Rorion, Relson, Rickson, Rolker, Royler, Robin, and Royce—and they kept the family art and the Gracie name alive.
The Land of Opportunity
Helio’s first-born son, Rorion, had ambitious dreams for his inherited fighting system. His first visit to America was in 1969. My return ticket was stolen, so I ended up staying here for a year,
says Rorion. I spent my time panhandling and sleeping on newspapers.
When he finally returned home, he was not bitter about his time abroad. America had actually made a positive impression on him, and, after earning a law degree from a prestigious Brazilian university, he returned to the land of opportunity in 1978 with the intention of establishing Gracie jiu-jitsu in the States. I always knew that if you make it in America, the whole world is going to know about it,
says Rorion.
Rorion’s vision of a jiu-jitsu martial arts empire, however, was not realized right away. The American public had no idea what Brazilian jiu-jitsu was, and, even more frustrating for Rorion, they had no desire to learn.
Due to the influence of such movies as Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, released in 1973, karate and kung fu had taken the States by storm. People began associating flashy moves and whirling kicks with powerful and effective fighting. Rorion knew this was far from realistic; after all, his family had been destroying flashy fighters for more than half a century. But it was tough to change the perceptions of a culture swayed by the romantic mysticism of Hollywood. Americans didn’t understand such powerful techniques as arm bars or ankle locks. They didn’t realize that a fighter lying on his back could actually be in an advantageous position.
Rorion set about his task by teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu out of his garage in Hermosa Beach, California, to anyone who was willing to learn. Every time new students would come to his house, Rorion would bring them inside and, after serving them watermelon juice and crackers, show them some tapes he had of his family fighting in